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Ken Novak: Digital Development
Communications and info tech in developing countries, especially wireless broadband and high-value applications
Bruce Sterling update: Now calling his concept "cybergreens": "They're all about creating irresistible consumer demand for cool objects that will yield a global atmosphere upgrade. It's the Net vs. the 20th-century fossil order in a fight that the cybergreens are winning. Why? Because they're not about spiritual potential, human decency, small is beautiful, peace, justice or anything else unattainable. The cybergreens are about stuff people want, such as health, sex, glamour, hot products, awesome bandwidth, tech innovation and tons of money.
We're gonna glam, spend and consume our way into planetary survival. My own favorite sci-fi planetary-saving scheme for naming, numbering and linking to the Internet every piece of junk we create so that it can be corralled and briskly recycled, creating a cradle-to-cradle postindustrial order and averting planetary doom, may sound pretty shocking and alien. But I wrote that book while in residency at a famous design school. I received an honorary doctorate there and the book was published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It gets great reviews, designers love it. It's not even science fiction -- it's a cybergreen manifesto.
In 1998, I had it figured that the dot-com boom would become a dot-green boom. It took a while for others to get it. Some still don't. They think I'm joking. They are still used to thinking of greenness as being "counter" and "alternative" -- they don't understand that 21st-century green is and must be about everything -- the works. Sustainability is comprehensive. That which is not sustainable doesn't go on. Glamorous green."
Coltan and Your Mobile: Disturbing effect of a key electronic material on the ongoing disaster in the Congo. "Columbite-tantalite (from here on referred to as Coltan). On its own it looks and feels like a very fertile soil, but when refined you get a highly heat-resistant metal powder called tantalum. Once refined, coltan has myriad uses, all of which pertain to its particular properties of being a dense mineral with the ability to withstand high temperatures and stress.To the high-tech industry this tantalum is a magic dust that is essential in making computer chips, stereo’s, VCR and DVD players and mobile phones. As such, coltan derivatives are used as capacitors in devices such as mobile phones and even complex missile guidance systems. ..
Coltan is mined by hand in the Congo by groups of men digging basins in streams by scrapping off the surface mud. They then “slosh” the water around the crater, which causes the Coltan ore to settle to the bottom of the crater where it is retrieved by the miners...
While a fair majority of the worlds tantalum supply comes from legitimate mining operations in Australia, Canada and Brazil the recent demand for tantalum has caused a more sinister market to begin flourishing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where 80% of the world’s known coltan supply is subject to “highly organized and systematic exploitation.” There, warring rebel groups - many funded and supplied by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda - are exploiting coltan mining in the Eastern DRC to help finance political and human oppression, child enslavement, torture and war. The mining area is also within one of the main ranges of the threatened Eastern Lowland Gorilla .. In April of 2001 the United Nations issued a report on the rape of resources from the DRC. In their findings field investigators reported that Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian rebels had looted and smuggled thousands of tons of coltan from the Congo into their countries to export to the global market, using the profits to finance their militias. ..Coltan smuggling has also been implicated as a major source of income for the military occupation of Congo which is also linked to forced child enlisting, rape and the rampant spread of HIV. ..
Manufacturers rely on their “suppliers” which are Tantalum capacitor makers like Kemet of Greenville, S.C., the world’s largest tantalum capacitor maker and on the companies trading the minerals. .. some 80 percent of the worlds Coltan comes from the DRC and most of that passes through several black market hands before its finally delivered to the refineries it what appears to be legitimate means."
Global Voices Online: Interesting compilation of current blog material from citizens of many counties, including Lebanon, Libya, China, Iran, with coverage of local news. Would provide interesting inputs to the "open source intelligence" movement.
Inflated influence of India's IT-factor: "In 2003, for example, India claimed to have exported US$8.7 billion worth of software, most of which went to the United States. But US companies recorded just US$420 million worth of software imports from India — a remarkable 20-fold difference. The GAO believes that this huge inconsistency arises, in part, from India misreporting financial data. For instance, India counts the earnings of all temporary workers in the United States as part of their exports figures. But this is against universally-accepted financial disclosure conventions suggested by the International Monetary Fund. The result is a gross over-representation of Indian software exports.Several factors also point to a relatively small impact on economic development from India's IT industry. In 2005, for instance, the IT exports industry was a marginal job-creator, employing 770,000 people — just 0.21 per cent of the total labour force."
WaterHealth International Closes Series C Funding: "WaterHealth International, Inc. (WHI) today announced the final close of its Series C funding for a total equity investment of more than $11 million. SAIL Venture Partners, L.P., anchored the latest investment of $4 million. Series A investor Plebys International LLC, founded and led by WHI CEO Tralance Addy, also invested in this round. The new investments are in addition to the $7.25 million equity investment anchored by Dow Venture Capital that WHI announced last month.WHI has more than 450 installations of its water purification and disinfection systems in developing countries around the world. This additional funding further strengthens WHI and will allow for accelerated growth in the company's target markets, primarily India and South Asia, West Africa, the Philippines and Mexico." This is the product developed by Ashok Gadgil, which I've been following for a few years. Glad to see it get substantial backing.
Non-profit Discount - DreamHost: Free web hosting for non profits from a reputable hoster. (via John Sequeria).
Strong Angel 3 lessons: This year's Strong Angel exercise has received extensive coverage. An excellent long summary is provided by Sanjana at his ict4peace blog. The linked magazine article provides a few tech takeaways:- "Perhaps the most popular technology used during Strong Angel was the Fossil Abacus smart personal object technology (SPOT) watch. This is a wristwatch with an embedded FM radio receiver designed to receive text messages. Although the watches are primarily intended for personal use, a portable and configurable FM transmitter with a 50-mile radius allows the devices to operate in areas without infrastructure, power or Internet connectivity. Messages can be sent to selected groups of SPOT wearers, such as police, fire department personnel and National Guard troops. ..
- [Also popular were] satellite dishes manufactured by GATR Technologies, Huntsville, Alabama. The dishes resemble oversized beach balls and are available in several sizes. The smallest antennas weigh 70 pounds and provide a two-megabit-per-second Internet connection. ..
- Route 1 Incorporated, Toronto, Canada, provided all of the event’s participants with a device called a Mobikey. Roughly the size of a data stick, it fits into a computer’s universal serial bus port to create a virtual private tunnel from any terminal or computer that users are operating in the field back to their organization’s server or personal desktop. ..
- One assumption that was quickly dispelled was that wireless Internet connectivity could be easily established. “Everybody showed up with a Wi-Fi [wireless fidelity] router and